Karl Kilbom

As the son of a blacksmith, Karl Kilbom grew up in a working class family of Walloon origin in the small town of Österbybruk outside Uppsala, where he started working in the steel mills at an early age.

In the year 1900, a socialist agitator visited Österbybruk to talk to the workers of the mills. Karl Kilbom, only 15 years old, was one of the 7 people who stayed after the meeting to participate in the formation of a socialist club in Österbybruk with the goal to establish a union. However, company spies had been present at the meeting and soon Kilbom was told he would not only lose his job, but also that his family, who lived in a house owned by the company, would be evicted, if he didn't quit political activism. This time, Kilbom gave in to the threats.

In 1903, Kilbom moved to Sandviken where he joined a socialist club. However, he didn't remain active there for long when he soon found job on a ship named Thetis, embarking from Gävle shipping lumber from Sweden to England and other places. The conditions for the workers on the boat were wretched and the pay was low, but Kilbom saw this as a great opportunity to explore the world, although, according to his autobiography, he had severe problems with seasickness.

In 1905, Kilbom disembarked the Thetis in Gävle. Unemployed, he joined the Social Democratic youth organization in the city, and he was schooled by the prominent socialist Fabian Månsson to be an agitator. Kilbom soon moved to Krylbo and Avesta to work for the party there.

In 1907, Kilbom was conscripted to do military service in the Swedish Navy and he soon found himself on the navy base of Skeppsholmen in Stockholm, and stationed on the coastal defense ship HMS Svea. While in the navy, Kilbom got in trouble with the commanders for spreading, what they called, "illegal" Social Democratic papers with anti-militarist messages.

After military service, Kilbom moved to Gothenburg and started working at a plant manufacturing safes, and became a leader of the union there. He also became more and more active in the Swedish Social Democratic Party and started to study Marxism. He was asked by the party to go on national speaking tours to spread the word of socialism to the workers in every corner of Sweden, and for many years Kilbom was without a home, always on the road.

In 1910, Karl Kilbom moved to Halmstad to do work for the Social Democratic party there. Within the party, Kilbom sided with the Left Opposition led by Zeth Höglund against the reformist party leader Hjalmar Branting. In 1917 the party split in two and Kilbom joined its Left-leaning faction, which supported the Bolsheviks in Russia and was called the Social Democratic Left Party of Sweden. It soon evolved into the Communist Party of Sweden. Already in 1915, Karl Kilbom had been made one of the main Swedish contacts with the Russian Bolsheviks and worked closely with Nikolai Bukharin who lived in Sweden during the war.

In the spring of 1917, Kilbom was sent to Finland on behalf of the Swedish Left-Socialist to persuade the Finnish Social Democrats to turn left too, but he soon realized that the Finnish socialists were already further to the left than himself, and in less than a year Finland would experience its own workers revolution.

From Finland, Kilbom traveled to Russia together with his Finland-Swedish comrade Karl H. Wiik, and after some difficulties at the border, they arrived in Petrograd and were greeted by Alexandra Kollontay. In Petrograd Karl Kilbom was taken to see a debate between Alexander Kerensky and Vladimir Lenin in front of a huge crowd of workers and soldiers. Kilbom did not understand what the speakers said, but afterwards Kollontay told him Lenin had spoken about the importance of making peace with Germany, while Kerensky had been speaking of continuing the war. The same evening, Kilbom had a chance to talk to Lenin briefly. They had met once before in Stockholm, and the Bolshevik leader now told him that a new revolution, in which the communists would take power, was imminent, and that he hoped the Swedish comrades would be prepared for the same.

Back in Sweden, Kilbom started working for the newly launched Left Party paper Politiken.

K. Kilbom - membership card of the Comintern

In December 1917, a month after the October Revolution, Kilbom, together with Zeth Höglund, went to Soviet Russia to spend the New Years and show their support for the Bolsheviks. At the Smolny the Swedes met with their Finnish Comrades, who were very happy after Finland finally having been given independence from Russia by the Bolshevik Government.

In 1919, Kilbom was approached in Stockholm by the American diplomats William C. Bullitt and Lincoln Steffens, who asked him if he could help them get to Russia and into contact with the Bolshevik government. Kilbom took the Americans to meet Lenin in Moscow and he greeted them as they said they wanted establish diplomatic relations between the United States and Soviet Russia. However, soon, President Woodrow Wilson repudiated the project and Bullitt resigned from Wilson's staff.

In 1921, Karl Kilbom was the head of the Swedish delegation at the Profintern congress (Red International of Labor Unions) held in Moscow. Their interpreter was a 17-year-old girl named Zoia Korvin-Krukovsky, and they soon became good friends. One morning, Zoia didn't show up, and Kilbom later found out that she had been arrested by the Soviet Secret Police as one of many suspects in a counterrevolutionary conspiracy. Kilbom refused to believe these allegations were true and spoke to high ranked Soviet officials like Karl Radek and Alexandra Kollontay to have the young girl released. Zoia was freed, and when she said she didn't want to stay in the Soviet Union, Karl Kilbom decided to marry the young girl so she could come with him to Sweden, where she helped the party working as a translator of Russian and became known as an artist.

In 1921, Sweden held its first democratic election where workers and women could vote, and Karl Kilbom was elected to the Lower House of the Riksdag.

In the fall of 1929, a Stalinist coup took place within the Swedish Communist Party, and Karl Kilbom together with the majority of the party's members were expelled by a group led by Hugo Sillén and Sven Linderot.

That same year, Kilbom launched a new Communist Party of Sweden, one that would be independent from Moscow, and became more critical of Stalin and the Soviet Union. In 1934 his party took the name Socialist Party (Socialistiska partiet). The party's supporters were generally called Kilbommare after Kilbom while the Comintern affiliated Communist Party members were called Sillénare after their party leader Hugo Sillén. The first couple of years, the Kilbom-Party was much bigger than the official Communist Party. Kilbom also managed to keep control over the communist daily Folkets Dagblad Politiken.

1931 was the year of the Ådalen Massacre, when the Swedish military opened fire on a demonstration of strikers, killing five workers. Kilbom wrote in Folkets Dagblad Politiken, calling the Swedish conservative government of Carl Gustaf Ekman a murder regime. For this “slander”, Kilbom was sentenced to two months in prison to be served at Långholmen, but he was eventually pardoned due to lung disease.

In 1937, Karl Kilbom was expelled from the Socialist Party, as the leadership was taken over by Nils Flyg. Later, during World War II, Nils Flyg turned the remnants of the party into a pro-Nazi organization as he sided with Hitler in the war against Stalin. But by then, most members of the party had already left together with Kilbom.

In 1938, Karl Kilbom rejoined the Swedish Social Democratic Party. Kilbom became very active as a leader within the Folkets hus movement.

During World War II, Kilbom fully supported the Swedish coalition government under the leadership of Prime Minister Per Albin Hansson.

• Karl Kilbom wrote many political pamphlets and a huge number of articles in different papers.
• Kilbom's three volume autobiography, published 1953–1955, is called:

Ur mitt livs äventyr (My Life’s Adventure)

I hemligt uppdrag (On Secrete Mission)

Cirkeln slutes (The Circle is Completed)

• Kilbom has also written many books on the history of the Walloon People's immigration to Sweden and their typical trades.